Aside from the fact that the very notion of a separate
military wing is an absurd fiction, and that the designation has almost no
chance of influencing Hezbollah's behavior, is there any reason to care?

I would argue that yes, there is; terror designations carry
real consequences -- if not the ones their authors intend. On balance, I believe
that when Western countries blacklist groups they define as terrorist, it harms
their own policy aims much more than it does the targeted group. Talking to
"terrorists" is political unpopular, but also necessary. It's one of many
tools required to deal with violent non-state actors, along with intelligence
work, policing, force, and economic levers.

In a reality where Hezbollah is a key central player, it
makes little to no sense to erect a cone of silence around them.

In the case of Hezbollah, the European Union will now join
the U.S. and member governments like Britain in making it all the more difficult
to find political solutions to the imbroglios of the Levant. Hezbollah is a
major combatant in Syria, while at home in Lebanon it's the largest and most
influential elected political movement.

Hezbollah's behavior is often frustrating (to its Lebanese
rivals as well as to Western governments), and it has been credibly linked to
violent plots, political assassinations, and pedestrian organized crime like
drug dealing and money laundering.

Naturally, the European Union would like to find ways to
curtail Hezbollah's reach, especially after the group was found responsible for
a deadly bombing in Bulgaria and a foiled attack in Cyprus.

But what does a terrorist designation achieve, and at what
cost?

First, it eliminates communication with Hezbollah, putting
even further out of reach meaningful diplomacy on the Syrian conflict and on
Lebanon. It also necessitates foolish gymnastics for states that continue their
relationship with the Lebanese government as if Hezbollah weren't the primary
power within that government. Effectively, it amounts to a blanket ban on
dealings with Hezbollah, since the Party of God does not make any distinction
between its military, political and social work; the organization is seamlessly
unified, its fighters as distinct from the supreme leadership as America's
Pentagon is from the White House.

Second, it ties the EU's hands in acting as a regional broker.
How can the EU leverage its power across the Levant's many conflicts if it
won't talk to one major player, and in fact has taken the step of branding it a
terrorist group while leaving alone other factions who engage in similar
violence?

In a reality where Hezbollah is a key central player, it
makes little to no sense to erect a cone of silence around them (already some governments, like
Britain, don't talk to Hezbollah officials, following the U.S. lead). Any
significant political accord in Lebanon must include Hezbollah, just as any
political resolution of the Syrian conflict will have to include Iran and
Hezbollah, along with the other states that sponsor the rebels and the
government. Any other approach is simply a denial of reality and doomed to fail.

Third, the designation will hardly dent Hezbollah. Already
Hezbollah operatives linked to violence or terror plots in the West are subject
to prosecution in Western courts. Already, Hezbollah's operations in the West
are underground. If agents of Hezbollah are raising money for the group by
trafficking narcotics in South America, or are training sleeper cells in
Germany, how will the designation stop them? These already are secret, illicit
operations; law enforcement and intelligence work might thwart them, but not
blacklists.

Logic and experience both teach us that politics requires
buy-in from the major stakeholders; that's even more true in conflict
resolution. You don't make peace with your friends. You can't influence a war -- or an unstable polity like Lebanon -- without points of entry to all the major
players. It simply doesn't work.

Historically, blacklists have never worked. Studies have
shown that in a small proportion of "terrorist" groups are eliminated by force,
but in the vast majority of cases when they give up violence, it is because of
a political settlement.

In the case of Hezbollah (like Hamas and a plethora of
Iranian institution before it), the blacklisting Western governments are
setting themselves up at best for embarrassment and hypocrisy, and at worst for
failure.

Ultimately, they will either let conflicts simmer on and do
nothing about them (as they largely have in Syria), in which case blacklisting
is just one element of a general diplomatic withdrawal. Or else they will get
involved with political negotiations, talks, and maybe an agreement that will
require them to make deals with the very groups that they earlier designated as
beyond-the-pale terrorists with whom any parley whatsoever is unacceptable.
When reality prevails, the Western governments end up in tortuous talks through
intermediaries, or else they simply ignore their entire directive.

There is almost nothing gained from a terror designation
other than the public relations bounce and perhaps some domestic political credit
with the tough-on-terror crowd.

But only politics and long-term strategy stand a chance at
limiting Hezbollah violence and shifting Hezbollah's political priorities. It's
unlikely that a smart Western policy would result in a behavior change from Hezbollah,
but it's guaranteed that a terror designation won't do the trick -- and in fact,
will only further limit the West's poor options.

Most Popular

Congressional Republicans and conservative pundits had the chance to signal Trump his attacks on law enforcement are unacceptable—but they sent the opposite message.

President Trump raged at his TV on Sunday morning. And yet on balance, he had a pretty good weekend. He got a measure of revenge upon the hated FBI, firing former Deputy Director Andrew McCabe two days before his pension vested. He successfully coerced his balky attorney general, Jeff Sessions, into speeding up the FBI’s processes to enable the firing before McCabe’s retirement date.

Beyond this vindictive fun for the president, he achieved something politically important. The Trump administration is offering a not very convincing story about the McCabe firing. It is insisting that the decision was taken internally by the Department of Justice, and that the president’s repeated and emphatic demands—public and private—had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Among the more practical advice that can be offered to international travelers is wisdom of the bathroom. So let me say, as someone who recently returned from China, that you should be prepared to one, carry your own toilet paper and two, practice your squat.

I do not mean those goofy chairless sits you see at the gym. No, toned glutes will not save you here. I mean the deep squat, where you plop your butt down as far as it can go while staying aloft and balanced on the heels. This position—in contrast to deep squatting on your toes as most Americans naturally attempt instead—is so stable that people in China can hold it for minutes and perhaps even hours ...

Invented centuries ago in France, the bidet has never taken off in the States. That might be changing.

“It’s been completely Americanized!” my host declares proudly. “The bidet is gone!” In my time as a travel editor, this scenario has become common when touring improvements to hotels and resorts around the world. My heart sinks when I hear it. To me, this doesn’t feel like progress, but prejudice.

Americans seem especially baffled by these basins. Even seasoned American travelers are unsure of their purpose: One globe-trotter asked me, “Why do the bathrooms in this hotel have both toilets and urinals?” And even if they understand the bidet’s function, Americans often fail to see its appeal. Attempts to popularize the bidet in the United States have failed before, but recent efforts continue—and perhaps they might even succeed in bringing this Old World device to new backsides.

The first female speaker of the House has become the most effec­tive congressional leader of modern times—and, not coinciden­tally, the most vilified.

Last May, TheWashington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.

She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.

As the Trump presidency approaches a troubling tipping point, it’s time to find the right term for what’s happening to democracy.

Here is something that, even on its own, is astonishing: The president of the United States demanded the firing of the former FBI deputy director, a career civil servant, after tormenting him both publicly and privately—and it worked.

The American public still doesn’t know in any detail what Andrew McCabe, who was dismissed late Friday night, is supposed to have done. But citizens can see exactly what Donald Trump did to McCabe. And the president’s actions are corroding the independence that a healthy constitutional democracy needs in its law enforcement and intelligence apparatus.

McCabe’s firing is part of a pattern. It follows the summary removal of the previous FBI director and comes amid Trump’s repeated threats to fire the attorney general, the deputy attorney, and the special counsel who is investigating him and his associates. McCabe’s ouster unfolded against a chaotic political backdrop which includes Trump’s repeated calls for investigations of his political opponents, demands of loyalty from senior law enforcement officials, and declarations that the job of those officials is to protect him from investigation.

How evangelicals, once culturally confident, became an anxious minority seeking political protection from the least traditionally religious president in living memory

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues.

Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them.

On Friday night, Facebook suspended the account of Cambridge Analytica, the political-data company backed by the billionaire Robert Mercer that consulted on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns.

The action came just before The Guardian and The New York Timesdropped major reports in which the whistle-blower Christopher Wylie alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data that an academic had allegedly improperly exfiltrated from the social network. These new stories, backed by Wylie’s account and internal documents, followed years of reporting by The Guardianand The Intercept about the possible problem.

The details could seem Byzantine. Aleksandr Kogan, then a Cambridge academic, founded a company, Global Science Research, and immediately took on a major client, Strategic Communication Laboratories, which eventually gave birth to Cambridge Analytica. (Steve Bannon, an adviser to the company and a former senior adviser to Trump, reportedly picked the name.)

Although the former secretary of state’s contentious relationship with the president didn’t help matters, Tillerson’s management style left a department in disarray.

Rex Tillerson is hardly the first person to be targeted in a tweet from Donald Trump, but on Tuesday morning, he became the first Cabinet official to be fired by one. It was an ignominious end to Tillerson’s 13-month stint as secretary of state, a tenure that would have been undistinguished if it weren’t so entirely destructive.

Compared with expectations for other members of Trump’s Cabinet, the disastrous results of Tillerson’s time in office are somewhat surprising. Unlike the EPA’s Scott Pruitt, Tillerson did not have obvious antipathy for the department he headed; unlike HUD’s Ben Carson, he had professional experience that was relevant to the job; and unlike Education’s Betsy DeVos, his confirmation hearing wasn't a disaster.

A new six-part Netflix documentary is a stunning dive into a utopian religious community in Oregon that descended into darkness.

To describe Wild Wild Country as jaw-dropping is to understate the number of times my mouth gaped while watching the series, a six-part Netflix documentary about a religious community in Oregon in the 1980s. It’s ostensibly the story of how a group led by the dynamic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh purchased 64,000 acres of land in central Oregon in a bid to build its own utopian city. But, as the series immediately reveals, the narrative becomes darker and stranger than you might ever imagine. It’s a tale that mines the weirdness of the counterculture in the ’70s and ’80s, the age-old conflict between rural Americans and free love–preaching cityfolk, and the emotional vacuum that compels people to interpret a bearded mystic as something akin to a god.

It’s not that they can’t consider other people’s perspectives. It’s that they don’t do so automatically.

It’s a rare person who goes out of their way to spend time with psychopaths, and a rarer one still who repeatedly calls a prison to do so. But after more than a year of meetings and negotiation, Arielle Baskin-Sommers from Yale University finally persuaded a maximum-security prison in Connecticut to let her work with their inmates, and to study those with psychopathic tendencies.

Psychopaths, by definition, have problems understanding the emotions of other people, which partly explains why they are so selfish, why they so callously disregard the welfare of others, and why they commit violent crimes at up to three times the rate of other people.

But curiously, they seem to have no difficulty in understanding what other people think, want, or believe—the skill variously known as perspective-taking, mentalizing, or theory of mind. “Their behavior seems to suggest that they don’t consider the thoughts of others,” says Baskin-Sommers, but their performance on experiments suggests otherwise. When they hear a story and are asked to explicitly say what a character is thinking, they can.